Naturally, when you step into a dark room in which a film is playing, your eyes go straight to the screen. You watch the projected, not the projector. The point is the image, not the image maker.
But in Jakrawal Nilthamrong and Kamjorn Sankwan's show, called "Side Reel", that order is disrupted, or challenged. The attraction remains on the screen, and yet upon entering the dark room on the 4th floor of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, your eyes are irresistibly drawn to a series of glass compartments that house spinning loops of 35mm film strip, the source of the image projected on the screen. It's a quaint, beautiful machine, a near-extinct beast in the digital age whose consistent purring is hypnotic and transgressive. The positioning of that 35mm thingamajig in the same room as the images it's projecting -- without any of the demarcations or parameters that usually separate a movie from its physical source -- is part of the show's essence: the deliberate overlapping of materials, stories, reality and roles.
Jakrawal is an experimental filmmaker, video artist and film lecturer (his feature Vanishing Point won several prizes in 2015). In this show, he has collaborated with Kamjorn, a gaffer -- or head electrician -- who has worked on many film sets, including Jakrawal's.
A conceptually intriguing work, Side Reel bases its loose narrative on Kamjorn's life, his hometown, his experience at a gold mine in his province, and his behind-the-scenes work in the film and TV industries. The means to relate all of this is photography, a short film (projected from that exposed machine, and starring Kamjorn as a hermit-like character) and a documentary on Kamjorn's plan to shoot a documentary of his own about ex-Kua Min Tang fighters (shot on hi-def digital video and shown on a TV screen in the adjacent room). It also includes a wall installation of a large model used in the shoot of the film.
On the main screen, a grainy, colour-saturated film shows Kamjorn as a gold prospector near the mines in Phayao and Phichit. Sifting sand in a stream in the hope of finding precious dust, he seems haunted by the rhythm of the water and the promise of gold. On a smaller screen in the next room, the crisp digital image tells of Kamjorn's personal background. It recounts his attempt to film a documentary about former nationalist fighters from China who have remained in the North of Thailand with the hope of getting Thai citizenship, and moves on to show Kamjorn's work as gaffer for a mythical-themed TV soap opera.
All of this is an experiment in the dismantling of frontiers -- between art and artists, dreams and reality, history and story, biography and movies, truth and lies. The wall text at the entrance explains that the show concerns "the idea of disputed areas in historical narrative through the collective memories" -- referring to the mines and the northern provinces, constructed by the mixed media of film and digital materials and hinged upon Kamjorn's own story.
It can be a little bit of a head-scratcher, and the various, interconnected threads of ideas, references and analogies can seem overreaching. But Jakrawal's and Kamjorn's conceptual foundation is solid, and the aesthetics of the installation pieces is rewarding to those who pay attention. The film in the main room -- like Jakrawal's other films, including the well-known Vanishing Point -- builds upon arresting visuals, a sense of mystery and heightened unease, aided by electronic sound design. There are cushions laid out on the spacious floor, an invitation to sit down and watch the barely 10-minute movies -- and visitors obligingly do so.
As mentioned above, you watch the film and you also watch the projector. The film-looping machine, besides its functional purpose, is an installation piece in itself, and part of the larger narrative (Jakrawal borrows it from a film lab, which no longer requires its services now that everything is digital). The materiality of film -- the images on the screen and their physical source -- is contained in this device; in its transparent bowel, you inspect a film strip as it runs at a steady speed, going through various contraptions, then passing through the beam of light of the projecting part before looping back into the inner part of the device.
And the process is repeated forever, or until someone pulls the plug, reminding us that every image we see comes from somewhere. A small and ambitious work, Side Reel may touch upon what seems like an old debate: film vs digital, image vs reality. In a way, yes.
But the artists' execution of their idea pays off, as they blur the boundaries and create a form of spectacle, asking us to contemplate the disputed areas of history and of the medium of film.
